Heart rate & calorie burn

latoyaz

I'm trying to calculate the calorie burn from my walk but its kind of hard finding an average HR because my route can make my HR range from 115 to 160. I have a HRM to keep track & I've set up the max & min HR on it so it beeps when I'm out of range. My route includes a street that's slightly inclined & my HR is about 125 on that, a little bit steeper hill from there & HR is about 140, then 4 others that I do up-down on & HR gets to 166 going up & about 117 coming down. I try to keep HR high when coming down but its hard because I don't want to lose footing & I've got a stroller with me. 1 lap takes me about 17 min & I usually do 2 or 3. Any suggestions on what to use?

RunBrew

Heart rate is directly related to the aerobic needs of your muscles- if they need more oxygen, the heart rate speeds up (along with resp rate) to deliver more oxygen and remove the wastes. So as your heart rate goes up and down, so does your caloric burn.

The most straight forward way to measure caloric needs is to record your heartrate every minute (or two, or three) along your whole workout and simply crunch the numbers at home by adding all the readings and dividing by the number of times you did it. plain old statistical average. It has some inherent error, but its a good starting point especially if the majority of your workout (like 75%) is spent in the same target training zone.
For that you'd need to do something that would bring your heartrate to max for a few minutes... like a half mile max speed time trial, then multiply that by .85 for the upper limit and .65 for the lower limit.

You could also obtain the necessary pieces to log that data on a smartphone and let the app crunch the numbers for you.

Edit: short of doing the math, or getting hardware to do it for you, all you can do is guesstimate the average heartrate over the whole 3 laps and plug it into an online calculator

WhyDelilah79

I use the digifit app. It's great, works out average heart beats and calaories burnt.